How to Animate Animals? Here Are 5 Tips for You

Image credits: design.tutsplus.com

The basic definition of animation is brining non-living things to life. These non-living things could be drawings, models, puppets or cut-outs. And these drawings/models/puppets/cut-outs can be of humans, inanimate objects or animals. 

When animating a human character, there are few chances of going wrong with the movement. You are a human being and have a fair idea about the movement of the human anatomy. With inanimate objects you have some freedom to play around based on their shapes & sizes. But animating animals can prove to be a little tricky. You cannot make them move in unbelievable ways. So how do you achieve believable animal movements? 

Of course, there is the most obvious way of collecting references from pets, zoos & animal parks. But how do you bring that extra edge while animating animals? Here are five tips for creating believable animal animations.

Path of Action

Simply put, path of action is the path along which the action flows. For animals, it will be the direction of movement. Concentrate on the way the spine moves with each pose & movement, and you will find your path of action.

Image Credits: Disney  

Scale

The size of the animal is of utmost important. After all you can’t show a rabbit walking at the pace of a snail or an elephant overtaking a cheetah in a race. Ask yourself, how large is the creature? This will help you determine the length & speed of its strides & movement, whether the animal is walking or running. This is especially useful, when animating anthromorphic animals. 

Image Credits: Morpheus306 on DeviantArt

Energy

This is best understood if you turn your animal into a chain of three balls. Each ball represents the hips, the chest and the head. Playing around with the energy and movement of each of these elements will give you the required variations in movement while animating animals.

Image credits: design.tutsplus.com 

Foot plants

The legs have only so many joints. Play along these joints to understand walking, running, sprinting, and other similar movements while animating animals. Mostly, the top three joints maintain a Z-shale and the ankle-foot does a reverse whip action as it follows through after the leg.

Tracking

Your animals are not gymnasts, unless, of course, your character is a gymnast. Under normal circumstances, each animal has a certain width between both feet. Adjusting this while animating animals will give you the proper body movement of the animal.

Image Credits: Disney  

That should cover it for the most part, armed with this basic recipe and a good piece of reference, you should be able to take on some animal locomotion! To be a professional animator, join a career course and master the skills required to make it big in the industry. 

Of course, nature has its own set of surprises, as would you as a character design and animator. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Till you maintain the basics, feel free to play with your animal movements. After all, movies like Zootopia would be no fun if everything was as per the natural world.